OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Program Equivalence for Algebraic Effects via Modalities
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2019
Year: 2019

This dissertation is concerned with the study of program equivalence and algebraic effects as they arise in the theory of programming languages. Algebraic effects represent impure behaviour in a functional programming language, such as input and output, exceptions, nondeterminism etc. all treated in a generic way. Program equivalence aims to identify which programs can be considered equal in some sense. This question has been studied for a long time but has only recently been extended to languages with algebraic effects, which are a newer development. Much work remains to be done in order to understand program equivalence in the presence of algebraic effects. In particular, there is no characterisation of contextual equivalence using a logic. We define a logic whose formulas express properties of higher-order programs with algebraic effects. We then investigate three notions of program equivalence for algebraic effects: logical equivalence induced by the aforementioned logic, applicative bisimilarity and contextual equivalence. For the programming language used in this dissertation, we prove that they all coincide. Therefore, the main novel contribution of the dissertation is defining the first logic for algebraic effects whose induced program equivalence coincides with contextual equivalence.
Forensic Similarity for Digital Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper we introduce a new digital image forensics approach called forensic similarity, which determines whether two image patches contain the same forensic trace or different forensic traces. One benefit of this approach is that prior knowledge, e.g. training samples, of a forensic trace are not required to make a forensic similarity decision on it in the future. To do this, we propose a two part deep-learning system composed of a CNN-based feature extractor and a three-layer neural network, called the similarity network. This system maps pairs of image patches to a score indicating whether they contain the same or different forensic traces. We evaluated system accuracy of determining whether two image patches were 1) captured by the same or different camera model, 2) manipulated by the same or different editing operation, and 3) manipulated by the same or different manipulation parameter, given a particular editing operation. Experiments demonstrate applicability to a variety of forensic traces, and importantly show efficacy on "unknown" forensic traces that were not used to train the system. Experiments also show that the proposed system significantly improves upon prior art, reducing error rates by more than half. Furthermore, we demonstrated the utility of the forensic similarity approach in two practical applications: forgery detection and localization, and database consistency verification.
Using Approximate Models in Robot Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Trajectory following is one of the complicated control problems when its dynamics are nonlinear, stochastic and include a large number of parameters. The problem has significant difficulties including a large number of trials required for data collection and a massive volume of computations required to find a closed-loop controller for high dimensional and stochastic domains. For solving this type of problem, if we have an appropriate reward function and dynamics model; finding an optimal control policy is possible by using model-based reinforcement learning and optimal control algorithms. However, defining an accurate dynamics model is not possible for complicated problems. Pieter Abbeel and Andrew Ng recently presented an algorithm that requires only an approximate model and only a small number of real-life trials. This algorithm has broad applicability; however, there are some problems regarding the convergence of the algorithm. In this research, required modifications are presented that provide more powerful assurance for converging to optimal control policy. Also updated algorithm is implemented to evaluate the efficiency of the new algorithm by comparing the acquired results with human expert performance. We are using differential dynamic programming (DDP) as the locally trajectory optimizer, and a 2D dynamics and kinematics simulator is used to evaluate the accuracy of the presented algorithm.
Differential Description Length for Hyperparameter Selection in Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

This paper introduces a new method for model selection and more generally hyperparameter selection in machine learning. Minimum description length (MDL) is an established method for model selection, which is however not directly aimed at minimizing generalization error, which is often the primary goal in machine learning. The paper demonstrates a relationship between generalization error and a difference of description lengths of the training data; we call this difference differential description length (DDL). This allows prediction of generalization error from the training data alone by performing encoding of the training data. DDL can then be used for model selection by choosing the model with the smallest predicted generalization error. We show how this method can be used for linear regression and neural networks and deep learning. Experimental results show that DDL leads to smaller generalization error than cross-validation and traditional MDL and Bayes methods.
Accurate 3D Cell Segmentation using Deep Feature and CRF Refinement
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

We consider the problem of accurately identifying cell boundaries and labeling individual cells in confocal microscopy images, specifically, 3D image stacks of cells with tagged cell membranes. Precise identification of cell boundaries, their shapes, and quantifying inter-cellular space leads to a better understanding of cell morphogenesis. Towards this, we outline a cell segmentation method that uses a deep neural network architecture to extract a confidence map of cell boundaries, followed by a 3D watershed algorithm and a final refinement using a conditional random field. In addition to improving the accuracy of segmentation compared to other state-of-the-art methods, the proposed approach also generalizes well to different datasets without the need to retrain the network for each dataset. Detailed experimental results are provided, and the source code is available on GitHub.
Learning to Screen
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Imagine a large firm with multiple departments that plans a large recruitment. Candidates arrive one-by-one, and for each candidate the firm decides, based on her data (CV, skills, experience, etc), whether to summon her for an interview. The firm wants to recruit the best candidates while minimizing the number of interviews. We model such scenarios as an assignment problem between items (candidates) and categories (departments): the items arrive one-by-one in an online manner, and upon processing each item the algorithm decides, based on its value and the categories it can be matched with, whether to retain or discard it (this decision is irrevocable). The goal is to retain as few items as possible while guaranteeing that the set of retained items contains an optimal matching. We consider two variants of this problem: (i) in the first variant it is assumed that the $n$ items are drawn independently from an unknown distribution $D$. (ii) In the second variant it is assumed that before the process starts, the algorithm has an access to a training set of $n$ items drawn independently from the same unknown distribution (e.g.\ data of candidates from previous recruitment seasons). We give tight bounds on the minimum possible number of retained items in each of these variants. These results demonstrate that one can retain exponentially less items in the second variant (with the training set).
Session-based Sequential Skip Prediction via Recurrent Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2019
Year: 2019

The focus of WSDM cup 2019 is session-based sequential skip prediction, i.e. predicting whether users will skip tracks, given their immediately preceding interactions in their listening session. This paper provides the solution of our team \textbf{ekffar} to this challenge. We focus on recurrent-neural-network-based deep learning approaches which have previously been shown to perform well on session-based recommendation problems. We show that by choosing an appropriate recurrent architecture that properly accounts for the given information such as user interaction features and song metadata, a single neural network could achieve a Mean Average Accuracy (AA) score of 0.648 on the withheld test data. Meanwhile, by ensembling several variants of the core model, the overall recommendation accuracy can be improved even further. By using the proposed approach, our team was able to attain the 1st place in the competition. We have open-sourced our implementation at GitHub.
SECTOR: A Neural Model for Coherent Topic Segmentation and Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

When searching for information, a human reader first glances over a document, spots relevant sections and then focuses on a few sentences for resolving her intention. However, the high variance of document structure complicates to identify the salient topic of a given section at a glance. To tackle this challenge, we present SECTOR, a model to support machine reading systems by segmenting documents into coherent sections and assigning topic labels to each section. Our deep neural network architecture learns a latent topic embedding over the course of a document. This can be leveraged to classify local topics from plain text and segment a document at topic shifts. In addition, we contribute WikiSection, a publicly available dataset with 242k labeled sections in English and German from two distinct domains: diseases and cities. From our extensive evaluation of 20 architectures, we report a highest score of 71.6% F1 for the segmentation and classification of 30 topics from the English city domain, scored by our SECTOR LSTM model with bloom filter embeddings and bidirectional segmentation. This is a significant improvement of 29.5 points F1 compared to state-of-the-art CNN classifiers with baseline segmentation.
Super-Resolution of Brain MRI Images using Overcomplete Dictionaries and Nonlocal Similarity
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Recently, the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images have limited and unsatisfactory resolutions due to various constraints such as physical, technological and economic considerations. Super-resolution techniques can obtain high-resolution MRI images. The traditional methods obtained the resolution enhancement of brain MRI by interpolations, affecting the accuracy of the following diagnose process. The requirement for brain image quality is fast increasing. In this paper, we propose an image super-resolution (SR) method based on overcomplete dictionaries and inherent similarity of an image to recover the high-resolution (HR) image from a single low-resolution (LR) image. We explore the nonlocal similarity of the image to tentatively search for similar blocks in the whole image and present a joint reconstruction method based on compressive sensing (CS) and similarity constraints. The sparsity and self-similarity of the image blocks are taken as the constraints. The proposed method is summarized in the following steps. First, a dictionary classification method based on the measurement domain is presented. The image blocks are classified into smooth, texture and edge parts by analyzing their features in the measurement domain. Then, the corresponding dictionaries are trained using the classified image blocks. Equally important, in the reconstruction part, we use the CS reconstruction method to recover the HR brain MRI image, considering both nonlocal similarity and the sparsity of an image as the constraints. This method performs better both visually and quantitatively than some existing methods.
Integrating Neurophysiological Sensors and Driver Models for Safe and Performant Automated Vehicle Control in Mixed Traffic
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2019
Year: 2019

In future mixed traffic Highly Automated Vehicles (HAV) will have to resolve interactions with human operated traffic. A particular problem for HAVs is detection of human states influencing safety critical decisions and driving behavior of humans. We demonstrate the value proposition of neurophysiological sensors and driver models for optimizing performance of HAVs under safety constraints in mixed traffic applications.
Can We Automate Diagrammatic Reasoning?
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Learning to solve diagrammatic reasoning (DR) can be a challenging but interesting problem to the computer vision research community. It is believed that next generation pattern recognition applications should be able to simulate human brain to understand and analyze reasoning of images. However, due to the lack of benchmarks of diagrammatic reasoning, the present research primarily focuses on visual reasoning that can be applied to real-world objects. In this paper, we present a diagrammatic reasoning dataset that provides a large variety of DR problems. In addition, we also propose a Knowledge-based Long Short Term Memory (KLSTM) to solve diagrammatic reasoning problems. Our proposed analysis is arguably the first work in this research area. Several state-of-the-art learning frameworks have been used to compare with the proposed KLSTM framework in the present context. Preliminary results indicate that the domain is highly related to computer vision and pattern recognition research with several challenging avenues.
Model based string stability of adaptive cruise control systems using field data
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2019
Year: 2019

This article is motivated by the lack of empirical data on the performance of commercially available Society of Automotive Engineers level one automated driving systems. To address this, a set of car following experiments are conducted to collect data from a 2015 luxury electric vehicle equipped with a commercial adaptive cruise control (ACC) system. Velocity, relative velocity, and spacing data collected during the experiments are used to calibrate an optimal velocity relative velocity car following model for both the minimum and maximum following settings. The string stability of both calibrated models is assessed, and it is determined that the best-fit models are string unstable, indicating they are not able to prevent all traffic disturbances from amplifying into phantom jams. Based on the calibrated models, we identify the consequences of the string unstable ACC system on synthetic and empirical lead vehicle disturbances, highlighting that some disturbances can be dampened even with string unstable commercial ACC platoons of moderate size.
Learning to see across Domains and Modalities
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Deep learning has raised hopes and expectations as a general solution for many applications; indeed it has proven effective, but it also showed a strong dependence on large quantities of data. Luckily, it has been shown that, even when data is scarce, a successful model can be trained by reusing prior knowledge. Thus, developing techniques for transfer learning, in its broadest definition, is a crucial element towards the deployment of effective and accurate intelligent systems. This thesis will focus on a family of transfer learning methods applied to the task of visual object recognition, specifically image classification. Transfer learning is a general term, and specific settings have been given specific names: when the learner has only access to unlabeled data from the a target domain and labeled data from a different domain (the source), the problem is known as that of "unsupervised domain adaptation" (DA). The first part of this work will focus on three methods for this setting: one of these methods deals with features, one with images while the third one uses both. The second part will focus on the real life issues of robotic perception, specifically RGB-D recognition. Robotic platforms are usually not limited to color perception; very often they also carry a Depth camera. Unfortunately, the depth modality is rarely used for visual recognition due to the lack of pretrained models from which to transfer and little data to train one on from scratch. Two methods for dealing with this scenario will be presented: one using synthetic data and the other exploiting cross-modality transfer learning.
Explainable Text-Driven Neural Network for Stock Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

It has been shown that financial news leads to the fluctuation of stock prices. However, previous work on news-driven financial market prediction focused only on predicting stock price movement without providing an explanation. In this paper, we propose a dual-layer attention-based neural network to address this issue. In the initial stage, we introduce a knowledge-based method to adaptively extract relevant financial news. Then, we use input attention to pay more attention to the more influential news and concatenate the day embeddings with the output of the news representation. Finally, we use an output attention mechanism to allocate different weights to different days in terms of their contribution to stock price movement. Thorough empirical studies based upon historical prices of several individual stocks demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method in stock price prediction compared to state-of-the-art methods.
ATMSeer: Increasing Transparency and Controllability in Automated Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

To relieve the pain of manually selecting machine learning algorithms and tuning hyperparameters, automated machine learning (AutoML) methods have been developed to automatically search for good models. Due to the huge model search space, it is impossible to try all models. Users tend to distrust automatic results and increase the search budget as much as they can, thereby undermining the efficiency of AutoML. To address these issues, we design and implement ATMSeer, an interactive visualization tool that supports users in refining the search space of AutoML and analyzing the results. To guide the design of ATMSeer, we derive a workflow of using AutoML based on interviews with machine learning experts. A multi-granularity visualization is proposed to enable users to monitor the AutoML process, analyze the searched models, and refine the search space in real time. We demonstrate the utility and usability of ATMSeer through two case studies, expert interviews, and a user study with 13 end users.
Simultaneous Sparse Recovery and Blind Demodulation
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

The task of finding a sparse signal decomposition in an overcomplete dictionary is made more complicated when the signal undergoes an unknown modulation (or convolution in the complementary Fourier domain). Such simultaneous sparse recovery and blind demodulation problems appear in many applications including medical imaging, super resolution, self-calibration, etc. In this paper, we consider a more general sparse recovery and blind demodulation problem in which each atom comprising the signal undergoes a distinct modulation process. Under the assumption that the modulating waveforms live in a known common subspace, we employ the lifting technique and recast this problem as the recovery of a column-wise sparse matrix from structured linear measurements. In this framework, we accomplish sparse recovery and blind demodulation simultaneously by minimizing the induced atomic norm, which in this problem corresponds to the block $\ell_1$ norm minimization. For perfect recovery in the noiseless case, we derive near optimal sample complexity bounds for Gaussian and random Fourier overcomplete dictionaries. We also provide bounds on recovering the column-wise sparse matrix in the noisy case. Numerical simulations illustrate and support our theoretical results.
Improving performance and inference on audio classification tasks using capsule networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2019
Year: 2019

Classification of audio samples is an important part of many auditory systems. Deep learning models based on the Convolutional and the Recurrent layers are state-of-the-art in many such tasks. In this paper, we approach audio classification tasks using capsule networks trained by recently proposed dynamic routing-by-agreement mechanism. We propose an architecture for capsule networks fit for audio classification tasks and study the impact of various parameters on classification accuracy. Further, we suggest modifications for regularization and multi-label classification. We also develop insights into the data using capsule outputs and show the utility of the learned network for transfer learning. We perform experiments on 7 datasets of different domains and sizes and show significant improvements in performance compared to strong baseline models. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first detailed study about the application of capsule networks in the audio domain.
Virtual Manipulation in an Immersive Virtual Environment: Simulation of Virtual Assembly
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2019
Year: 2019

To fill the lack of research efforts in virtual assembly of modules and training, this paper presents a virtual manipulation of building objects in an Immersive Virtual Environment (IVE). A worker wearing a Virtual Reality (VR) head-mounted device (HMD) virtually perform an assembly of multiple modules while identifying any issues. Hand motions of the worker are tracked by a motion sensor mounted on the HMD. The worker can be graded based on his/her overall performance and speed during this VR simulation. The developed VR simulation can ultimately enable workers to identify unforeseen issues (e.g., not enough clearance for an object to be installed). The presented method can solve current deficiencies in discrepancy detection in 3D scanned models of elements. The developed VR platform can also be used for interactive training and simulation sessions that can potentially improve efficiency and help achieve better work performance for assemblies of complex systems.
A Low-overhead Kernel Object Monitoring Approach for Virtual Machine Introspection
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Monitoring kernel object modification of virtual machine is widely used by virtual-machine-introspection-based security monitors to protect virtual machines in cloud computing, such as monitoring dentry objects to intercept file operations, etc. However, most of the current virtual machine monitors, such as KVM and Xen, only support page-level monitoring, because the Intel EPT technology can only monitor page privilege. If the out-of-virtual-machine security tools want to monitor some kernel objects, they need to intercept the operation of the whole memory page. Since there are some other objects stored in the monitored pages, the modification of them will also trigger the monitor. Therefore, page-level memory monitor usually introduces overhead to related kernel services of the target virtual machine. In this paper, we propose a low-overhead kernel object monitoring approach to reduce the overhead caused by page-level monitor. The core idea is to migrate the target kernel objects to a protected memory area and then to monitor the corresponding new memory pages. Since the new pages only contain the kernel objects to be monitored, other kernel objects will not trigger our monitor. Therefore, our monitor will not introduce runtime overhead to the related kernel service. The experimental results show that our system can monitor target kernel objects effectively only with very low overhead.